The XXXX School of Public Administration at XXXX University is my first choice among doctoral programs because of the sheer excellence and comprehensive nature of your curriculum. I also very much appreciate the well-established character of your especially distinguished program, its long history and excellent record of accomplishment at producing leaders in our profession. The DPA Degree Program in Public Administration at the ____ School graduates great public administrators and innovative scholars.
A very hard-working student from Korea where I finished both my BA and MA Degrees in Public Administration, nothing excites me more than research in our field. I am ready to hit the ground running at the ____ School and could not be more confident of my dedication to excellence, taking full advantage of the unique opportunities that you offer to first-year students to become fully immersed in research. I look forward to contributing to the celebration of diversity and professional camaraderie in your DPA program at ____ University as a Korean woman with excellent language abilities and communication skills; not only in English but also Chinese, my third language, at which I am at an intermediate stage and continuing to improve.
I adapt quickly to new environments and learned many valuable things that will help me to excel in your program, especially because of studying for one full year in Germany as an exchange student. In addition to Germany, this enabled me to see much of Europe including France, England, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland. In Berlin, I not only studied German public administration very closely but even visited government offices in person for real-world exposure. I also had the invaluable privilege of spending 3 months in the Philippines completing a research internship in Finance and comparative Philippine and Korean development trends.
I am fully engaged with everything having to do with public management, collaborative and participatory governance, human resource issues, and particularly non-profit management and governance. I have worked as a staff member for an NGO that collaborates extensively with the Korean Government, and this has heightened my passion for research concerning the interaction between private and public sectors. Most of all, I look forward to an intensive and prolonged study of gender representativeness and bureaucracy. I especially admire the research contributions of Professor ____ in Public Management at the ____ School because of her brave and pioneering efforts involving questions of gender and representativeness. It would be a special honor for me to study under Dr. Schnell and hopefully she could become my academic advisor and guide me in my research concerning women and human organization in Korea. I am also very much engaged with the literature on transparency, anti-corruption, and good governance and I came to a better understanding of the complexity of these issues, in part, as a result of working for the Economic Development and Cooperation Fund (EDCF) of the Export-Import Bank of Korea, an agency dedicated to fomenting economic development.
I especially appreciate the potential of public-private financial partnerships that help governments to address deficits through the utilization of financial structures that include private investment. I see this as a potentially hopeful strategy for overcoming the hurdles that we face along the road towards the reunification of North and South Korea. This was one of the reasons why I was so thrilled about the opportunity to study in Germany, since I am now very well read concerning the German process of unification of East and West, the bumps along the way, and strategies that helped not only to make the unification possible but also propel Germany forward as Europe’s undisputed economic leader. I look forward to teaching Public Administration in Korea as well as working for or with both governmental and non-governmental agencies. My focus as a master's student was primarily on enhancing quantitative understandings for research. I presented an article using the Instrument Variable Model along with my colleague in the Korean Association for Government Studies. My thesis project dealt with gender representativeness and organizational integrity, with female leadership as a moderating variable. This research is now under review at a peer-reviewed journal.
Service to the members of my community is a deeply engrained part of my character. As an undergraduate student, I joined the ROTARACT Club and gave lessons to students in need of special assistance and visited old people living alone. Later, during my master's Program, I worked with the Korean Chinese Youth Exchange Program hosted by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. Finally, I also worked as a Research Assistant for more than a year, collecting and editing data and conducting basic searches for material to help my advisor with his research.
I thank you for considering my application to the ____ School at ____ University.
DPA Public Administration Personal Purpose Statement